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While urban life can be characterized by endeavors to settle stable and safe environments, for many people, urban space is rarely stable or safe; it is uncertain, troubled, imbued with challenges and perpetually under pressure. As the concept of unsettled appears to define the contemporary urban experience, this multidisciplinary book investigates the conflicts and possibilities of settling and unsettling through open and speculative analysis. The analytical prism of unsettled renders urban space an indeterminate ground unfolding through routines, temporalities and contestations in constant tension between settling and unsettling. Such contrasting experiences are contingent on how urban societies confront, undergo and overcome turbulence and difficulties in time and space. Contributions drawing on theoretical reflections and empirical accounts—from Argentina, Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, the UAE, the UK, the USA and Vietnam—give insights into plural occurrences of the unsettled, which might tie down or unleash transformative, liberatory and emancipatory potentials. This book is for students, professionals and researchers interested in the uncertainties, foundations, disturbances, inconsistencies, residuals and blind fields, which constitute the urban both as lived space and as social, cultural and political ideal.

Based on an ethnographic account of a transitory space of an aircraft under lockdown, this article reflects on quarantine as the product of expert technocratic knowledge, which blurs fine-grained social moments and relationships to create a homogenous functional space. It argues that space under lockdown is a form of a functional alienated space produced and conditioned by non-transparent management mechanisms that are legitimized by seemingly routinized protocols and abstract representations. While this argument is not optimistic as regards capacity building for political or social change, it identifies current spatial configurations as a unique opportunity for experiencing how representations of space prevail over (struggles in) everyday life.

This paper conceptualizes affective urbanism as both research framework and praxis, engaging professionals and concerned publics alike in the insurgent making of cities. With its focus on affect and bodily encounters, it taps into the rich knowledge of practices of improvising and inventing in everyday life, which tend to fall outside the realm of discursive and visual representations. An analysis of spatial practices of the collective Plataforma de Afectados Por La Hipoteca in Barcelona illustrates how a mobilization of affects fosters not only individual, but first and foremost a collective capacity to negotiate belonging, appropriate space and contest alienated conditions of everyday life. The argument rests on the hypothesis that affect implicates the ethical engagement with people at places of everyday life, thus producing a medium and means for transgressing socio-spatial divides and challenging practices of exclusion, othering and dispossession. The value of this kind of work does not necessarily lie in the quality of conceived or materialized design, but rather in enacting an inclusive and empathic design praxis which connects to people’s multiple lived spaces and cultivates lived space of deep and caring social relations.

Through exploring the spatial conditions and materializations of caring practices and relations, this chapter aims at developing an urban(ized) understanding of care. It thereby seeks to interweave care debates into conceptual debates in urban studies and planning theory. The chapter discusses the tension between fields of care and ‘uncare’ as an analytical lens to situate care debates—and the ambivalences unfolding around them—within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban life. By taking a spatial perspective and by fostering an understanding of care geographies, three perspectives are developed: 1) How the scale of analysis and research in urban theory contributes to a wider understanding of the changing landscape of care; 2) how moments of presence and of encounters in public space allow both the acknowledgment and alteration of caring infrastructures; and 3) how care and crisis are fundamentally linked, and how care perspectives bear a potential to move analytical prisms beyond crisis-centered narratives.

This paper conceptualizes affective urbanism as both research framework and praxis, engaging professionals and concerned publics alike in the insurgent making of cities. With its focus on affect and bodily encounters, it taps into the rich knowledge of practices of improvising and inventing in everyday life, which tend to fall outside the realm of discursive and visual representations. An analysis of spatial practices of the collectivePlataforma de Afectados Por La Hipotecain Barcelona illustrates how a mobilization of affects fosters not only individual, but first and foremost a collective capacity to negotiate belonging, appropriate space and contest alienated conditions of everyday life. The argument rests on the hypothesis that affect implicates the ethical engagement with people at places of everyday life, thus producing a medium and means for transgressing socio-spatial divides and challenging practices of exclusion, othering and dispossession. The value of this kind of work does not necessarily lie in the quality of conceived or materialized design, but rather in enacting an inclusive and empathic design praxis which connects to people’s multiple lived spaces and cultivates lived space of deep and caring social relations.

This chapter expands understanding emancipation beyond the confines of political philosophy and positions it as a critical concept in urban studies. The first part focuses on whose emancipation is addressed by outlining distinctions between political and social emancipation, whereas the following sections introduce relations between emancipation and the city, and emancipation and urbanization. After a critique of the colonizing features of emancipation in modern discourses, debates on emancipation will be situated in relation to debates on the post-political condition. Thereafter, emancipation is analyzed per its current use in post-foundational thought, thus constructing a conceptual frame to situate the subsequent book sections and chapters.

In Germany, land consumption for settlement and transport development amounts to 100 ha/day, thus significantly exceeding the goal set by Germany's sustainability strategy, which aims at reducing the rate of the expansion of built-up areas to 30 ha/day by the year 2020. Increased orientation of local authorities and stakeholders towards the promotion of economic competitiveness, complex interrelations between actors involved in planning, substantial planning autonomy of Germany's local administrative units, as well as stronger democratic norms in planning, render a traditional linear planning scheme obsolete. The federal administration and publicly funded research institutions therefore opted for a non-legislative approach aiming at the production of a body of methodologies, which would engage participation processes and deliberative decision-making. The name being a German acronym for “Research for the Reduction of Land Consumption and for Sustainable Land Management”, this collaborative national...

ispartof: Unsettled Urban Space: Routines, Temporalities and Contestations pages:114-128 ispartof: pages:114-128 status: published